A new spate of books picks up where chick lit left off: in the dark and scary aftermath of a broken marriage

Chris didn't turn to meet my gaze. Instead, as he felt my eyes come to rest on him, he let out a slow, pointed exhale. I bristled, disappointed and annoyed. "Want to tell me what you hate so much about your life today?" I said, wincing inward slightly as the harsh words came out.

And so, still not turning his face, with its long, aquiline nose, huge blue-green eyes, and those full, pink lips I was delirious to call mine when we were first married, he said, simple as pie, "I'm done." Then he sighed again, and turned slowly to look at me with a flat, empty gaze. "I'm done with this," he said, gesturing with his hand to encompass our living room, our kitchen, our home, our son, our future, our dreams, every single memory we'd ever made together in our 13 years as a couple, and me, suddenly meaningless me.

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This passage, from Stacy Morrison's Falling Apart in One Piece: One Optimist's Journey Through the Hell of Divorce, won't win any literary awards, but when I read it in bed late one night, the scene felt familiar. I couldn't immediately say why, and then it hit me: It reminded me of nightmares I'd had during rocky passages with my own husband. In the dreams, he said things like, "I'm done with this," and then walked out, just like Morrison's Chris—although, in my own horrific visions, my husband took our four-year-old daughter with him.

As someone who got dumped a lot before I married, I may have an unhealthier-than-usual fear of abandonment. But as someone who has seen once happily married friends go through brutal divorces, I also know that divorce is the shadow lurking behind any modern marriage. Adult love, unlike parent-child love, is conditional. Any married person can do what Chris did: decide one day that the bad stuff outweighs the good, and head for the exit. I finished Falling Apart in One Piece at two in the morning, while my husband watched a samurai movie on Netflix next to me.

Morrison's memoir is only one of many entries in an increasingly popular subset of chick lit: nonfiction memoirs by women whose husbands left, cheated, or died. Critic Janet Maslin has dubbed the genre "little did I know" literature, but I'm partial to "divorce porn."

While the single-gal chick lit of the late '90s, with its brand names and glitzy nightlife, can be seen as the fictional flowering of the Clinton-era economic boom, one way to look at divorce porn is as a product of the recent financial downturn. Bridget Jones's Diary may have flown off the shelves when the Dow was up, and we thought nothing of dropping $400 on Christian Louboutins. These days, we consign the mules, bake casseroles, and read about loss. Recent months have seen a parallel trend of "layoff lit," books about people who lost money, jobs, or both: The Bag Lady Papers by Alexandra Penney, a Bernie Madoff victim; Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness, by former House & Garden editor Dominique Browning; and Janelle Brown's novel This Is Where We Live, about an L.A. couple about to lose their home. (Divorce porn is for people who like their loss narratives served hot.)

Divorce porn's Citizen Kane was Elizabeth Gilbert's 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, which hung out on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list for 57 weeks. Gilbert's literal and metaphorical "journey"—embarked upon after a crippling divorce in her early thirties—provided endless fodder for book group discussions and set publishers on a tear to find Elizabeth Gilbert 2.0, a bright female voice who could tell a difficult, personal, and ultimately uplifting true tale.

They found several. Four divorce pornoirs have hit the Times hardcover bestseller list in the past year: Julie Metz's Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal, Isabel Gillies' Happens Every Day: An All- Too-True Story, Elizabeth Edwards' Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities, and Jenny Sanford's Staying True. Morrison's Falling Apart in One Piece was published in March to a big publicity push and so far is selling briskly, by Simon & Schuster and Redbook, of which she is editor- in-chief.

The memoirs have slightly different angles but share several characteristics: a matter-of-fact, non-whiny style; a few Real Housewives-worthy screaming matches; and a large dose of philosophical musing on the gifts that overcoming strife can bring. The details are so over-the-top that if these were novels, editors would have rejected them as too hackneyed. Metz's husband of 12 years dropped dead of a pulmonary embolism in their upstate New York home, after which she learned that he'd had at least five affairs, including one with her good friend. Television actress Gillies (she plays Christopher Meloni's wife on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) moved to Oberlin with her two sons and poetry-professor husband and promptly found herself replaced by his pretty, Prada-wearing, half-French colleague. Edwards' and Sanford's books are obviously different from the others—they fill in the details of front-page stories we already know, and make for especially titillating reads because political wives seldom spill. Then, too, the two philanderers' transgressions were so outrageous, hubristic, or just plain weird—Mark Sanford's public reference to his mistress as his "soul mate"; John Edwards' carrying on an affair at the height of his presidential campaign, as his wife battled a recurrence of breast cancer—who could help wanting to know more, more, more?

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In the ex-Mrs. Sanford's book, we learn that after Mark's rambling press conference revealing his mistress's existence, he called Jenny to ask, "How'd I do?" to which she responded, "Are you kidding me? You cried for her and said little of me and the boys." We learn that Elizabeth was haunted by the vision of herself dying of breast cancer and John going on to marry Rielle Hunter (who has now told her story to ELLE contributor Lisa DePaulo, by the way, and reaped the predictable scorn). "I was dying and he had chosen to spend time with someone so completely unlike me," Elizabeth writes. "I saw my death not simply as a transition for my family but as my complete erasure from my family's life." Edwards' story doesn't fit neatly into the divorce porn oeuvre because no matter how much she insists she's moving forward, taking things day by day, the reader knows that she has limited life left to live— it's hard to fathom just what her happy ending might be.

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While there was a frisson of fear in my devouring of Falling Apart, there was also rank voyeurism. Divorce porn confers the illicit thrill of schadenfreude (or schadenbroad?). Long-term coupledom can be emotionally violent, depressing, and sometimes both at once, but these five women really suffered—they really got screwed. Ordinary marital malaise is practically jaunty by comparison. My man might be lazy/noncommunicative/slobbish/self-centered, we think, but at least he's not the phony poet who dumped his wife for the English department's newest hire. Phew!

In fact, I find myself prodding my friends about their own marriages less out of genuine interest than a desire to see how my own stacks up. My husband even jokes that I'm motivated to have sex with him as much by the chance to one-up my friends as by genuine desire. "We did it twice this week," I can gloat. "How often do you do it?" Like any self-respecting spouse, I tell my husband he's dead wrong, but he knows that I know he's on to something.

If schaden-broad's your thing, it doesn't pay to think too deeply about divorce porn, because the feeling is based on a trick of narrative. Most of the books begin with the moment the marriage ended, rewind to the beginning of the relationship, then make their way chronologically to the end. In other words, we know the denouement before the narrators' earlier selves do, so we get to be the sleuths they couldn't be. It's like a literary scavenger hunt: The day Sylvia (Gillies' husband's mistress) was going to ride in the car, Josiah screamed at Gillies because there were Cheerio crumbs on the seat. At Henry's funeral, Julie Metz's best friend wept uncontrollably over his coffin. Mark Sanford refused to take a fidelity vow when he married Jenny.

"Everything went still but for the sound of Sesame Street coming from the other room," Gillies writes in Happens Every Day. "I went into the library and knelt in front of him. He looked up at me and tears streamed out of his eyes. His mouth crumpled downward and he squeezed his eyes shut.... This was the cry of someone whose heart was breaking." Perhaps, but I couldn't help but wonder if Gillies' husband was crying the crocodile tears of a man secretly plotting his escape with his girlfriend.

One day, when I was discussing Metz's Perfection at an outdoor café with two friends, one a gay man, the other a straight woman, a young mother next to us suddenly leaned over. "I read about her book," she said, cradling her toddler in her lap, "and I gotta say, How could she not know? A man gives you signs whether he's trustworthy. She must have known—and chose not to look at it. She deserves what she got."

That seemed ridiculous to me, not to mention ridiculously harsh. We all blind ourselves to conflict, whether in friendship or marriage. My closest girlfriend had been acting distant for months before she announced in response to a party invitation that she didn't want to see me ever again. A new boyfriend was hesitant and flat on the phone but I cheerily insisted we keep our plans to go out for dinner, a dinner over which he broke up with me.

Denial is adaptive, after all. Not every stray look or flirtatious interlude at a party means your husband is a dog. At a deeper level, if you actually believe your spouse is having an affair and you ask whether it's true, you run the risk that he'll say yes and leave. And as distastefully French as this may sound, maybe you don't want that; maybe you subconsciously think that the affair will play itself out and you'd rather not know about it. If there are children involved, marital rupture is that much more awful and complicated.

Beyond giving us the chance to gawk at other people's problems, divorce porn may resonate, counterintuitively, as a form of escape fantasy. Due to the cataclysmic crises the narrators suffered, they're allowed to do two things most women cannot do (or won't allow themselves to do): get angry, and get out. Divorce porn is An Unmarried Woman masquerading as Perils of Pauline.

While female annoyance and eye-rolling have been in vogue for some time— think of the chat-and-chews on Sex and the City or the entire career of actress Patricia Heaton—female fury is still roundly derided (as has been pointed out ad nauseam, men are never shrill, and only women and gay men are bitchy) or considered frightening. And yet our anger is there, the bleak undercurrent to merlot-loosened banter at girls' nights or the flash in the eye of the kvetching mother at the playground.

Justified as they are in their wrath, the divorce pornoirists are conduits for those of us who don't feel we have a right to our own. Angry women are ugly. Angry women are selfish. Angry women are nasty bitches no one wants to be married to. Anger is unhealthy. It gives you cancer and makes you die. And so we do anything to purge ourselves of it: yoga, Pilates, therapy, couples therapy, meditation, antidepressants, book groups, reality television, tabloid magazines, and wine, wine, wine!

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Most of the time, when I get mad at my husband it's over something trivial, but underneath rage roils: There is too much financial pressure on me; I don't get enough of my husband's affection now that we have a child; it hurts me when he derides my family, even if I deride them too. My shame about my black feelings leaves me snapping at him for small slights: misplaced twenties, too-frequent cosleeping. The irony—or the raison d'être?—is that the carping renders real conversations more difficult to have. When I read Jenny Sanford's account of finding Mark's love letters in the top drawer of his desk at work—he'd made virtually no effort to hide them—I rooted for her less because she was wronged than because her desire to throttle her husband was so incontrovertibly earned.

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And I rooted even harder when Jenny gave Mark the heave-ho. After these authors seethe, they get to flee. After the prolonged hell of learning about their husbands' infidelities, they get what every harried married mother longs for when her day is long, her children sticky, and her husband mean: solitude.

A friend who has struggled in her marriage once asked me which I'd prefer: if my husband dropped dead or we wound up divorcing. "I guess if I had to choose, I'd say dropped dead," I answered.

"Me too!" she cried.

"We're sick," I said.

"No, we're not," she said. "I don't really want him to die. But I fantasize about it sometimes, because when I try to envision the alternative, divorce, I worry that I'd be doing the wrong thing, that I'd ruin my kids' lives and end up alone or with someone else who just had a whole other set of things that I hated." I got it. She wanted the release of no longer being married to him without the responsibility of having made the decision to end it herself.

In this regard, the divorce porn authors may even have something on founding mother Gilbert. Although she has millions of fans, a substantial minority of readers could not get past the fact that she left her own marriage for reasons that she leaves vague, suggesting that maybe Gilbert isn't liberated and brave so much as self-indulgent and impossible to please. Our authors can't be tarred with that brush, however. Each was a victim, a passive player in the undoing of her marriage—unless you believe that men only cheat (or die!) when their women do them wrong.

The yearning for freedom is what makes the post-nuclear portions of the books so appealing: "I was happy to hang up laundry, go on walks in the woods or on the pink rock ledges, make paintings of the rocks and sea," writes Metz of a post-widowhood Maine vacation with a friend. Morrison's first night alone in the house after Chris moved out is described like this: "I waited for sadness to come rushing into the empty place where he used to be, but what I mostly felt was...quiet. After eight long months of being on guard in my own home, it was a relief to have an hour or two every night to be by myself, and not be the object of Chris' rancor or indifference." There is a romance to these visions that is almost sensual. When the authors tell us about the antidepressants...they went off after losing their husbands, or the heightened intimacy they felt with their children when said children joined them in their suddenly roomy king-size beds, you feel envious. Morrison and company didn't want to be husbandless, and yet when they had to be, they got through it and discovered that solitude could be voluptuous.

Ultimately, however, these authors don't make the cut as role models of women alone. Metz, Morrison, and Gillies report that they are all in new relationships, having found partners within a few years of losing their husbands. (For her part, Jenny Sanford says she'll "love again.") So yes, many married women dream of being alone, but before too long, they're signing up for Internet dating (Metz and Morrison) or meeting a single dad at the park (Gillies). Our longing to be part of a couple doesn't vanish, no matter the level of betrayal, which is kind of heartening when you think about it. It's also kind of dispiriting. As the critic Molly Haskell put it, "Being alone and liking it is, for a woman, an act of treachery, an infidelity far more threatening than adultery." Those who crave narratives of unaccompanied women must dust off their tattered Marilyn French, Mary Gordon, or Anaïs Nin. Our divorce pornoirists, it seems, are too much like...us.